Understanding Corporate Bond
Spreads Using Credit Default Swaps
Alejandro Garcia and Jun Yang, Financial Markets Department
•
Since the beginning of the credit crisis, spreads
on corporate bonds (the difference between the
yields on a corporate bond and a government
bond with identical cash flows) worldwide have
widened markedly.
•
This article decomposes Canadian corporate
spreads into default and liquidity components
for selected Canadian firms, using a model that
extracts default information from credit default
swaps.
•
During the credit crisis in 2008, the liquidity
component for speculative-grade bonds increased earlier than it did for investment-grade
bonds, which is consistent with a “flight-to-quality” scenario.
•
Although the results are based on a small sample
of Canadian firms, they are consistent with recent
research on how liquidity risk is priced in corporate bond markets.
S
ince the beginning of the credit crisis in mid2007, corporate spreads worldwide widened
markedly. In Canada, the aggregate spread
for investment-grade firms reached a maximum of
401 basis points (bps) in January and March of 2009,
substantially more than the historical average of
92 bps; the spread on the equivalent index in the
United States reached 656 bps in December 2008,
also substantially more than its historical average of
153 bps (Chart 1).1 Owing to the problems in funding
markets, corporations and financial institutions began
to replace “risky” assets with “safer” ones; this “flightto-quality” effect resulted in large price declines in
equity and corporate bond markets and increases in
prices in the government market.
In this article, the corporate bond spread is defined as
the difference between the yields on a corporate bond
and a government bond with identical cash flows.
Under this definition, the corporate spread reflects the
additional compensation required by investors to hold
the corporate bond compared with the return on the
default-free asset (the government bond). This additional yield compensates investors for two types of
risk: (i) the risk of default, i.e., that the firm may not
be able to meet the promised cash flows; and (ii) the
liquidity risk, i.e., the risk that the investor may not
be able to sell the bond quickly, before it matures,
without a significant discount to the existing market
price.
Since promoting financial stability is part of the
mandate of central banks, they have a natural interest
in understanding what drives changes in corporate
spreads—default risk, liquidity risk, or both—since
1
The average spreads for Canada and the United States are calculated
for the period from 31 December 1996 to 18 May 2009, using the
Merrill Lynch corporate indexes for investment-grade firms. The new
maximum spreads surpassed previous record highs for this period of
272 bps on 10 October 2002 for the United States and 143 bps on
24 October 2002 for Canada.
UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
23
Chart 1: Corporate bond spreads in Canada and the
United States
Basis points
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
1997
1999
2001
Canadian corporate
bond index
2003
2005
2007
2009
U.S. corporate
bond index
Note: Merrill Lynch spreads for broad corporate indexes. Corporate yield spreads are
adjusted only for embedded options. Sample: 31 December 1996 to 18 May 2009.
Sources: Bloomberg, Merrill Lynch
able to default risk and how much stems from liquidity
risk. Corporate spreads seem to be too high for
default risk to be the only contributing factor; in
addition, they are inconsistent with historical default
rates and recoveries (Elton et al. 2001). Observed
corporate spreads are also inconsistent with traditional structural models based on Merton (1974)
(Huang and Huang 2003). As well, changes in
spreads on corporate bonds are not well explained
by changes in the factors affecting default risk
(Collin-Dufresne, Goldstein, and Martin 2001), and
the unexplained portion appears to have a common
factor. Liquidity risk may therefore be an important
factor affecting corporate spreads, since corporate
bond markets are much less liquid than government
bond markets. Various approaches are used in the
literature to measure the two components of corporate bond spreads. These approaches are detailed next.
Liquidity component
their policy response will be different, depending on
which factor is responsible. If, for example, rising
corporate spreads result mainly from an increase in
liquidity risk, and the central bank judges that this
warrants intervention, then it might address the
situation, at least in part, by providing liquidity. In
contrast, if rising spreads are the result of increased
default risk, the appropriate policy response may be
quite different.2 Decomposing corporate spreads is
not easy, because both components are unobservable and possibly correlated.
This article is part of a series of papers that studies
the risks—mainly default and liquidity—that are priced
into corporate bond spreads.3 Its contributions to this
research agenda are as follows: (i) the use of information from the credit default swap and bond markets
for Canadian firms; (ii) analysis that is performed at
the firm level; and (iii) a focus on Canadian firms that
access funding in the United States.4
Related Literature
For some time, researchers have been investigating
how much of the corporate bond spread is attributOne reason why the policy reaction may be different for liquidity
risk than for default risk is that the former may be the result of a
“friction” (i.e., information), whereas the latter may be the result of
systematic factors.
3 Garcia and Gravelle (2008) use a structural model with equity data to
decompose Canadian corporate spreads.
4 Other work decomposing spreads for Canada focuses on the
aggregate index spread, using equity-based structural models
instead of prices on credit default swaps (see Garcia and Gravelle
2008).
Researchers have used different methods to measure
the liquidity of corporate bonds and to study the
relationship between liquidity, liquidity risk, and
corporate spreads. Chen, Lesmond, and Wei (2007)
use implicit bid-ask spreads and the frequency of
zero returns to measure the liquidity of corporate
bonds. Chacko (2005) and Mahanti et al. (2008) use
the turnover of portfolios holding the bond, and others
(Edwards, Harris, and Piwowar 2007; Goldstein,
Hotchkiss, and Sirri 2007; Bao, Pan, and Wang 2008)
use measures of the impact on prices. In general, they
find a positive relationship between the illiquidity of
corporate bonds and their yield spreads. Several
recent studies (de Jong and Driessen 2006; Downing,
Underwood, and Xing 2007; Acharya, Amihud, and
Bharath 2008) analyze how liquidity risk is priced in
corporate bond returns. They find that, relative to
investment-grade bonds, speculative-grade bonds
carry a higher liquidity-risk premium. Most of these
papers estimate models focusing on one aspect of
illiquidity, such as transactions costs, inventory risk,
asymmetric information, or search costs. In addition,
most papers relate their illiquidity measures to corporate spreads in regressions, and are therefore not
suitable to decompose corporate bonds into liquidity
and default components.
2
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UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
Default component
In general, researchers use two methods to estimate
the default risk of corporate spreads. One way is to
use historical default rates and recoveries; this
method ignores the risk premium associated with
default risk. Thus, in these models, no consideration
is given to the extra premium that investors require to
invest in risky securities whose returns are correlated
with systematic factors. Another method is to determine default risk relative to other traded financial
instruments, such as equity and credit derivatives.
According to Merton (1974), equity can be treated as a
call option on firm values. Corporate bonds can be
treated as a portfolio holding an equivalent risk-free
government bond and shorting a put option. Equity
prices can be used to extract information about the
firm’s valuation process, which can then be used to
price corporate bonds. The validity of this method
requires that the structural models be correctly
specified. Huang and Huang (2003) show, however,
that since most structural models are misspecified,
their results cast doubts on the value of using structural models to decompose corporate spreads.
With the growth of markets for credit derivatives in
recent years, researchers have started to use credit
derivatives, such as credit default swaps, to estimate
the default component of corporate spreads (Longstaff,
Mithal, and Neis 2005). We use credit default swaps
to decompose the spreads on Canadian corporate
bonds because, as discussed in the next section,
their lower susceptibility to liquidity effects makes
them a much purer measure of default risk. In addition, the reduced-form approach we use to evaluate
credit default swaps is less prone to misspecification.
payments. There is a payment to compensate for
default losses only in the case of a default.
Figure 1 shows the cash flows for a typical CDS
when no default occurs, while Figure 2 shows cash
flows in a default scenario. The orange boxes represent the annuity payments made by the protection
buyer, while the black box in Figure 2 represents the
payment that the protection seller makes to the
protection buyer upon default.
Figure 1: Credit default swap: Cash flows when there
is no default
Time
Maturity
Protection buyer’s annuity payments
Note: The orange boxes represent the payments made by the protection buyer to
the protection seller.
Source: Bank of Canada
Figure 2: Credit default swap: Cash flows when
default occurs
Market value
Face value
Credit Default Swaps
A credit default swap (CDS) is a contract that provides
insurance against the default of a particular company.
The company is known as the reference entity, and a
specific bond of the company is known as the reference obligation. The quantity of the reference obligation to which the derivative contract applies is known
as the notional principal.5 In a CDS, there are two
parties to the contract: the buyer of credit protection
makes periodic payments to the seller of the credit
protection until either the contract matures or there is
a default event by the company. In exchange for the
periodic payments made by the buyer, the seller
agrees to pay the buyer the difference between the
face value and the market value of the reference
obligation if a credit event occurs. If no default occurs,
the protection buyer still makes all the agreed-upon
5
The total outstanding notional principal of CDS contracts for a given
reference entity can exceed the total amount outstanding of the
reference obligation.
Time
Default
Maturity
Protection buyer’s annuity payments
Note: The orange boxes represent the payments made by the protection buyer to the
protection seller. The black box represents the payment made by the protection seller to the
protection buyer at default.
Source: Bank of Canada
As in any swap, the premium (which determines the
annuity payments) is the rate that equates the expected
streams of cash flows that the buyer and the seller
make. The CDS premium therefore contains information on the default probability associated with a
reference entity, since this information is embedded in
the expected payment made by the protection seller.
CDS contracts are commonly used to extract proxies
for default risk for several reasons. As contracts, not
securities, CDSs are far less sensitive to liquidity
UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
25
effects, since securities are in fixed supply, while the
supply of CDSs can be arbitrarily large. Because of
this reduced sensitivity, CDSs provide a better measure
of default risk. As well, it is less costly for investors to
liquidate CDSs prior to maturity than to liquidate a
corporate bond, since investors simply enter into a
swap contract in the opposite direction. Further, CDSs
are not likely to become “special” like treasury bills,
or “squeezed” like corporate bonds.6 In principle,
therefore, CDSs should contain mainly default information about the reference entity. However, they are
not totally immune to liquidity effects, since search
costs may be high for illiquid CDS contracts.7
In principle, CDSs should
contain mainly default information
about the reference entity.
However, they are not totally
immune to liquidity effects.
It is difficult to obtain data from the Canadian-dollar
CDS market for Canadian reference entities, since this
market is underdeveloped and illiquid compared with
the U.S. market. Moreover, because of the illiquidity
of the market, these data are likely to contain a nonnegligible liquidity component, which violates our
basic modelling assumption. An alternative is to use
data from CDSs issued in U.S. dollars for Canadian
entities. Although better than data from the Canadiandollar CDS market, these data are available for a
limited number of firms, only some of which may have
liquid contracts. A caveat persists as well with respect
to the degree of liquidity risk embedded in CDS
prices—anecdotal evidence suggests that, during a
crisis, CDS prices, like corporate bonds, might carry
a liquidity-risk premium. In this study, we use the most
liquid CDS contracts to decompose Canadian corporate spreads and make every effort to minimize any
decomposition bias resulting from potential illiquidity
in CDS contracts. In the next section, we present the
data used to conduct our analysis, as well as the
controls that helped to focus on the most liquid CDS
contracts in our sample.8
Data
In practice, the CDS quote can be different from the
CDS transaction price. The CDS quote reflects the
risk characteristics of the reference entity, whereas
the transaction price can also reflect the differential in
counterparty risk between the protection buyer and
the seller. For this article, we use quote data obtained
from Markit Inc., the leading provider of CDS data.
We obtained a dataset of Canadian firms for which
there are CDS contracts and bonds with a maturity
greater than one year. Because of the aforementioned
data limitations on Canadian-dollar-denominated
CDSs, we use U.S.-dollar-denominated securities
(CDSs and bonds). We also need data for the yields on
U.S. risk-free zero-coupon bonds, which are obtained
from the study by Gürkaynak, Sack, and Wright (2006).
Our initial dataset included 38 Canadian firms. Filtering
out Canadian Crown corporations, firms with too few
CDS or corporate bond quotes, firms without senior
unsecured debt, and firms for which the number of
common dates between the CDS data and the corresponding bonds are less than a year, we are left with a
set of eight large Canadian firms from various sectors
of the economy. Six of the firms are rated BBB, while
the other two are rated CC (see Table 1 for selected
statistics on the firms’ bond data). The bond and CDS
data used in the article cover different samples for
each firm, beginning as early as June 2006 and ending
as late as November 2008.9
For the Canadian firms selected, we prepared the
data by selecting bonds and CDS prices that had two
or more quotes per week and interpolating them
linearly, when necessary, to obtain a common day of
the week used to change the frequency of the data
from daily to weekly. We did this to obtain a dataset
where, at each moment in time, there is an observation for the CDS and the bond prices, which allows
Note that default risk on Canadian-dollar and U.S.-dollar bonds
issued by the same Canadian entity may differ, to the extent that
they could be subject to different rules governing default or debt
workouts in different jurisdictions.
9 The sample data available for the eight firms used here are for the
following periods: Firm 1, 30 June 2006–14 November 2008; Firm 2,
23 June 2006–31 October 2008; Firm 3, 8 June 2007–24 October
2008; Firm 4, 22 June 2007–31 October 2008; Firm 5, 14 July
2006–7 November 2008; Firm 6, 30 June 2006–7 November 2008;
Firm 7, 10 November 2006–14 November 2008; and Firm 8, 30 June
2006–31 October 2008.
8
“Specials” are specific repo rates significantly below prevailing
market interest rates for loans of similar maturity and credit risk.
“Squeezed” refers to a shortage of supply relative to demand for a
particular security, as evidenced by a movement in its price (or its
repo rate) to a level that is not in line with the prices of comparable
securities.
7 Longstaff, Mithal, and Neis (2005) use the most liquid CDS contracts
in their study.
6
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UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
Table 1: Firms’ bond data
Rating
BBB
CC
Number of firms
6
2
Minimum number of bonds
2
3
Maximum number of bonds
3
4
Note: Data from Markit Inc. cover the period June 2006 to November 2008. The BBB
rating includes all ranges within the BBB category. CC-rated firms were downgraded
to D in April 2009.
Source: Markit Inc.
the model to extract information simultaneously from
all prices and thus to decompose the spread.
Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for each CDS
contract. The CDS premiums show that the eight
firms in our sample can be separated into two groups:
sub-investment (or speculative-) grade firms, which
includes Firms 1 and 2; and investment-grade firms.
Firms in the first group have higher and more volatile
CDS premiums, while those in the second group have
lower and more stable premiums.
Table 2: Contract data for credit default swaps
Premiums on credit default swaps (in basis points)
Mean
Standard
deviation
Maximum
Firm 1
1,665
1,612
6,984
Speculative
Firm 2
1,082
967
5,995
Speculative
Firm 3
87
64
405
Investment
Firm 4
350
90
538
Investment
Firm 5
108
50
213
Investment
Firm 6
141
57
306
Investment
Firm 7
75
66
337
Investment
Firm 8
71
69
403
Investment
Rating
Note: All CDS contracts have a 5-year maturity.
Source: Bank of Canada
Methodology
We use a reduced-form model based on the framework of Jarrow and Turnbull (1995); Lando (1998); and
Duffie and Singleton (1999). In this model, investors
demand a return for holding corporate bonds that
includes the risk-free rate, the default risk of the
issuer, and the liquidity premium associated with the
security. Similarly, investors demand compensation
for selling the CDS that includes the risk-free rate and
the default risk associated with the reference entity
(bond issuer). Note that, in the model, we assume that
the bond yield includes compensation for liquidity and
default risk, whereas the CDS includes compensation
only for default risk.10
The methodology can be summarized as follows. We
have two unobserved variables, liquidity and default,
as well as time series for the CDSs and several bond
prices for the same reference entity. From the CDSs,
we obtain the default factor, which is used to obtain
the liquidity factor from the bond prices. We are able
to determine both factors by estimating the parameters of the model to minimize pricing errors.11 We
proceed to create a synthetic zero-coupon 5-year
bond. For the synthetic bond, we find the corresponding yield to maturity and subtract the risk-free rate to
obtain the corporate spread. The corporate spread
thus obtained is then decomposed into its default
component, such that the yield to maturity includes
only the risk-free rate and the default compensation,
and its liquidity component (the difference between
the corporate spread and the default component).
Results
We first analyze the results around three key events:
(i) the Bear Stearns liquidation of two hedge funds
that invested in various types of mortgage-backed
securities on 31 July 2007; (ii) the announcement by
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that it would
provide term financing to facilitate the acquisition by
JPMorgan Chase of The Bear Stearns Companies on
24 March 2008; and (iii) Lehman Brothers filing for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 15 September
2008.12 Chart 2 shows the decomposition for the
average firm from the investment-grade category, and
Chart 3 shows the results for the average firm from the
speculative-grade category.
The liquidity component of both investment- and
speculative-grade firms started to increase right after
the liquidation of the Bear Stearns hedge funds,
consistent with the overall market conditions. After the
acquisition of Bear Stearns, the investment-grade
firms’ liquidity and default component decreased
slightly, and the speculative-grade firms’ components
also decreased for a short period. Both of these
effects possibly reflect the awareness of government
support for troubled firms. After the filing by Lehman,
This assumes that the CDS liquidity compensation is negligible.
See the Box on p. 28 and Longstaff, Mithal, and Neis (2005) for
details on the model and the estimation.
12 Another key event was the halt on redemptions on three investment
funds on 9 August 2007 by BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank. This,
with the Bear Stearns acquisition, triggered subsequent events that
led to the financial crisis.
10
11
UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
27
Estimating the Model
Let denote the risk-free rate, the intensity of the
Poisson process governing default, a liquidity
premium, and c the continuous coupon rate paid by
the corporate bond. Each of the processes , ,
and is stochastic. Following Lando (1998), we
assume that a bondholder recovers a fraction 1–w
(fixed at 50 per cent) of the par value of the bond
in the event of default. Then a corporate bond that
pays a continuous coupon rate c is priced as
follows:
From equating both payment legs, we obtain the
expression for the CDS premium as:
(4)
To obtain closed-form evaluations for both corporate bonds and CDSs, we specify the risk-neutral
dynamics for default-intensity process and
liquidity process as follows:
dλt = (α − βλ)dt + σ λ dZt
(1)
(5)
dγ = ηdZt .
where T is the time to maturity. Let s denote the
continuous premium paid by the CDS buyer. The
present value of the premium leg of a credit default
swap (Pre) can be expressed as,
(2)
The closed-form formula for both corporate bonds
and CDS premiums can be found in Longstaff,
Mithal, and Neis (2005). To estimate the model, we
minimize the pricing error for the CDS premiums
and the bond prices associated with a given firm.
We recover from time-series observations of
CDS premiums;1 then, at each time t, we recover
by minimizing the percentage pricing errors from
at least two corporate bonds at time t. We find
maximum-likelihood estimates for those parameters by minimizing the sum of corporate bond
pricing errors over the entire sample.
The value of the protection leg of a CDS (Pro) can
be expressed as:
(3)
1
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UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
The initial values used for the parameters are reasonable
estimates, based on the literature and recent evidence.
Chart 2: Corporate bond spreads for an average
investment-grade firm
Synthetic zero-coupon 5-year bond
%
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
2007
Mean liquidity
2008
Mean default
Mean spread
at all—in the market. Right after the filing by Lehman,
however, we notice that, for both types of firm, it is the
increase in the liquidity component that dominates the
change in the spread. This is in line with the drastic
deterioration in North American credit markets.
In more general terms, our results show that, for
investment-grade firms, the majority of the spread
corresponds to liquidity; on average, the liquidity
component accounts for 63 per cent of the spread.
For speculative-grade firms, it is the reverse—the
majority of the spread corresponds to default, with the
default component accounting for 77 per cent of the
spread, on average.13 In addition, our results provide
evidence that the liquidity component increased
earlier for the speculative-grade firms.
Note: The green lines represent the dates when Bear Stearns liquidated two hedge funds
that had invested in mortgage-backed securities (31 July 2007), the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York announced that it would provide term financing to facilitate JPMorgan Chase’s
acquisition of Bear Stearns (24 March 2008), and Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy (15 September 2008).
Source: Bank of Canada estimates
For investment-grade firms, the
majority of the spread corresponds
to liquidity. For speculative-grade
firms, the majority of the spread
corresponds to default.
Chart 3: Corporate bond spreads for an average
speculative-grade firm
Synthetic zero-coupon 5-year bond
%
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
-5
2006
Mean liquidity
2007
Mean default
2008
Mean spread
Note: The green lines represent the dates when Bearn Stearns liquidated two hedge funds
that had invested in mortgage-backed securities (31 July 2007), the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York announced that it would provide term financing to facilitate JPMorgan Chase’s
acquisition of Bear Stearns (24 March 2008), and Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy (15 September 2008).
Source: Bank of Canada estimates
the default component of the average investment- and
speculative-grade firm started to increase, while the
liquidity component for both increased substantially.
It is difficult to determine the medium-term impact of
the filing by Lehman, since there are only a limited
number of days for which the CDS data for Canadian
firms are still reliable. After September 2008, the CDS
data quickly become unreliable as a pure source of
default risk, owing to reduced trading—or no trading
These results are consistent with those of de Jong
and Driessen (2006) and Acharya, Amihud, and
Bharath (2008) in finding that the credit crisis has had
a larger impact on speculative-grade than on investment-grade bonds. As shown in Charts 2 and 3, the
overall spread is much higher and the liquidity component (red line) increased markedly and earlier for
speculative-grade firms.14 For the average investment-grade firm, the increase in the liquidity component was less drastic than the corresponding increase
for the average speculative-grade firm, at least prior
to the Lehman filing, after which it dominates the
change in the spread. At this point, however, the CDS
data are a less-reliable source of default risk.
Similarly, a comparison of the volatility of the liquidity
component across firms shows that spreads for
(speculative-grade) firms 1 and 2 exhibited larger
volatilities in their liquidity component than did
(investment-grade) firms 3 to 8 (Table 3). Although
firm 7 has a mean liquidity component higher than
that of firm 2, the associated standard deviation is
much smaller.
For speculative-grade bonds, the liquidity premium is a smaller share
of a wider spread, and thus is larger in absolute terms.
14 Note that the vertical axis in Chart 3 is more than three times larger
than the one in Chart 2.
13
UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
29
Table 3: Volatility of the liquidity component (%)
Mean
Standard
deviation
Rating
Firm 1
4.13
5.74
Speculative
Firm 2
2.14
3.85
Speculative
Firm 3
1.58
0.37
Investment
Firm 4
1.57
1.04
Investment
Firm 5
1.39
0.74
Investment
Firm 6
1.98
1.12
Investment
Firm 7
3.00
0.63
Investment
Firm 8
0.93
0.98
Investment
Note: The level of the liquidity component is obtained from the total spread minus the
spread with only default taken into account.
Source: Bank of Canada
Conclusion
In this article, we used a reduced-form credit-risk
model to decompose the spread for Canadian firms
that issue bonds in the U.S. market. Our main results
suggest that the proportion of liquidity and default risk
varies across firms and over time, and that the nature
of the variation depends on the nature of the shock to
the economy. More-specific results that apply to the
credit crisis of 2007–08 are: (i) the relative size of the
liquidity component in corporate bond spreads is
larger for investment-grade bonds than for speculative-grade bonds; (ii) both the liquidity and default
components of corporate spreads for speculativegrade bonds increased markedly after the beginning of
the crisis; and (iii) the liquidity component increased
more for speculative-grade bonds during the credit
crisis, which is typical of a “flight-to-quality” phenomenon. While these findings are consistent with intuition, they should be verified with a larger sample of
firms once more data become available as the market
for CDSs for Canadian firms develops further.
The proportion of liquidity and
default risk varies across firms and
over time, and the nature of the
variation depends on the nature
of the shock to the economy.
A key implication of these results is that, in designing
policies to address problems in credit markets, it is
important to consider that the liquidity component in
corporate spreads for investment- and speculativegrade bonds behaves differently than the default
risk, especially during crisis episodes.
Future work on the decomposition of corporate bond
spreads should focus on: (i) the study of Canadiandollar-denominated corporate bond markets, (ii) comparing different methods of decomposing Canadian
corporate spreads, and (iii) incorporating time-varying
default- and liquidity-risk premiums in the analysis. In
addition, appropriate policy responses under different
conditions should be investigated.
Literature Cited
Acharya, V. V., Y. Amihud, and S. Bharath. 2008.
“Liquidity Risk of Corporate Bond Returns.”
Available at <http://www.moodyskmv.com/
conf08/papers/liq_risk_corp_bond_ret.pdf>.
Bao, J., J. Pan, and J. Wang. 2008. “Liquidity of
Corporate Bonds.” Available at <http://web.mit.
edu/wangj/www/pap/bond_liquidity080322.pdf>.
Chacko, G. 2005. “Liquidity Risk in the Corporate
Bond Markets.” Harvard Business School Working Paper. Available at <http://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=687619>.
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UNDERSTANDING CORPORATE BOND SPREADS USING CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS
BANK OF CANADA REVIEW AUTUMN 2009
Chen, L., D. A. Lesmond, and J. Wei. 2007. “Corporate
Yield Spreads and Bond Liquidity.” Journal of
Finance 62 (1): 119–49.
Collin-Dufresne, P., R. S. Goldstein, and J. S. Martin.
2001. “The Determinants of Credit Spread
Changes.” Journal of Finance 56 (6): 2177–207.
de Jong, F. and J. Driessen. 2006. “Liquidity Risk
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fall%20Vienna%202005.pdf>.
Literature Cited (cont’d)
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